We spent billions of dollars and billions of words on an election to switch from President Obama, a Democratic Senate and a Republican House to President Obama, a Democratic Senate and a Republican House.

Every election predictor was wrong, except one: Incumbents usually win.

Republicans have taken out a sitting president only once in the last century, and that was in 1980 when Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter. Sadly, Reagan's record remains secure.

The Democrats ran up against the incumbency problem in 2004. The landslide election for Democrats in 2006 suggests that Americans were not thrilled with Republicans around the middle of the last decade. And yet in 2004, President George W. Bush beat John Kerry more handily than Obama edged past Romney this week.

Democratic candidate John Kerry won 8 million more votes than Al Gore did in 2000, and he still couldn't win. All the Democrats' money, media, Bush Derangement Syndrome and even a demoralized conservative base couldn't trump the power of incumbency in 2004.

After supporting Mitt Romney in 2008, some of you may recall, I ran off with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie midway through Obama's first term for precisely that reason: The near-impossibility of beating an incumbent president. Christie seemed like the kind of once-in-a-lifetime star who could pull a Reagan upset against an incumbent president.

But I was wrong. Romney was the perfect candidate, and he was the president this country needed right now. It's less disheartening that a president who wrecked American health care, quadrupled gas prices, added $6 trillion to the national debt and gave us an 8 percent unemployment rate can squeak out re-election than that America will never have Romney as our president.

Indeed, Romney is one of the best presidential candidates the Republicans have ever fielded. Blaming the candidate may be fun, but it's delusional and won't help us avoid making the same mistakes in the future.

Part of the reason incumbents win is that they aren't forced to spend half the election year being battered in primaries. Obama started running anti-Romney ads in Ohio before the Republican primaries were even over. Noticeably, Romney's negatives were sky-high in Ohio, but not in demographically similar states like Pennsylvania.

One of Obama's first acts in office was to bail out the auto industry to help him in states he'd need in the upper Midwest, such as Michigan and Ohio. He visited Ohio nearly 50 times, while not visiting lots of other states even once. Obama was working Ohio from the moment he became president. Meanwhile, Romney didn't wrap up the primaries until the end of May.

A little less time beating up our candidate in the primaries so that he could have started campaigning earlier would have helped. In this regard, please remember that no mere House member is ever going to be elected president. Most of them harm their political careers by running. (Where's Thaddeus McCotter these days? Michele Bachmann is fighting for her political life.)

Please stop running. You're distracting us from settling on an actual nominee.

No one can be blamed for the hurricane that took the news off the election, abruptly halting Romney's momentum, but Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock can be blamed on two very specific people: Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock.

The last two weeks of the campaign were consumed with discussions of women's "reproductive rights," not because of anything Romney did, but because these two idiots decided to come out against abortion in the case of rape and incest.

After all the hard work intelligent pro-lifers have done in changing the public's mind about a subject the public would rather not think about at all, these purist grandstanders came along and announced insane positions with no practical purpose whatsoever, other than showing off.

While pro-lifers in the trenches have been pushing the abortion positions where 90 percent of the country agrees with us -- such as bans on partial birth abortion, and parental and spousal notification laws -- Akin and Mourdock decided to leap straight to the other end of the spectrum and argue for abortion positions that less than 1 percent of the nation agrees with.

In order to be pro-life badasses, they gave up two easy-win Republican Senate seats.

No law is ever going to require a woman to bear the child of her rapist. Yes, it's every bit as much a life as an unborn child that is not the product of rape. But sentient human beings are capable of drawing gradations along a line.

Just because I need iron to live doesn't mean I have to accept 100,000 milligrams, which will kill me. If we give the guy who passed bad checks a prison furlough, that doesn't mean we have to give one to Willie Horton. I like a tablespoon of sugar in my coffee, but not a pound.

The overwhelming majority of people -- including me -- are going to say the law shouldn't force someone who has been raped to carry the child. On the other hand, abortion should be illegal in most other cases.

Is that so hard for Republicans to say?

Purist conservatives are like idiot hipsters who can't like a band that's popular. They believe that a group with any kind of a following can't be a good band, just as show-off social conservatives consider it a mark of integrity that their candidates -- Akin, Mourdock, Sharron Angle, Christine O'Donnell -- take wildly unpopular positions and lose elections.

It was the same thing with purist libertarian Barry Goldwater, who -- as you will read in my book, "Mugged: Racial Demagoguery From the Seventies to Obama" -- nearly destroyed the Republican Party with his pointless pursuit of libertarian perfection in his vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

I like a band that sells NO albums because it proves they have too much integrity to sell out.

We have a country to save. And just as the laws of elections generally mean the incumbent president wins, they also mean the party out of the White House typically stages a big comeback in midterm elections. BIG. Don't blow it with purist showoffs next time, Republicans.

Romney is a Rino but he would have been good for the country. We need a positive figurehead. Honor, dignity and class in the WH. Romney/Ryan would have given us that. We simply need someone who loves this country and for 4 more years, we don’t.

I know its a popular Freeper thing to simply dismiss people who dont agree with their purist views as "Rinos" or some other nonsense, and I sometimes fall into that trap. Anne gets on my nerve sometimes, and I dont always agree with everything she says.

BUT, she makes some good points here. Republicans need to get smarter in order to start WINNING. Conservatives, well, we need to get less stupid as well.

You see, the Democrats had a long term strategy. They did what it took to WIN, and now that they have done so for some time, they can tack hard left, and get what they wanted all along.

They dont call Republicans the Stupid party for nothin..

5
posted on 11/08/2012 5:13:24 AM PST
by Paradox
(Unexpected things coming for the next few years.)

Romney is a Rino but he would have been good for the country. We need a positive figurehead. Honor, dignity and class in the WH. Romney/Ryan would have given us that. We simply need someone who loves this country and for 4 more years, we dont.

Exactly. I wasn't a fan of Romney's and was disappointed that he won the nomination, until I saw that first debate. He shined there and 0boober was shown for the empty suit he is. Lerher did what a moderator should and let the candidates go at it. Romney should have capitalized on that going forward. Instead he left important things like Libya on the table. But to my original point, as the campaign entered the fall season, Romney looked more presidential and Husein looked more like the punk he is. Sadly, we don't have the electorate we had in 1980. That WWII generation is almost gone.

9
posted on 11/08/2012 5:17:00 AM PST
by YankeeReb
(The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. B.H. 0bama)

I am going to accept the notion that, because we don’t appeal to ethnic minorities, we can’t win. We had good candidates and great issues, and lost anyway. The Democrats corral the ethnic minorities. That’s why the Democrats continually call us racist, ironically. They want to scare the ethnic groups.

Obama's turnout dropped, what, eight million votes? And what was Romney's turnout? Lower than McCain's in 2008.

He did not appeal to many evangelicals. He had lukewarm at best appeal to Tea Partiers, many of whom held still their nose and voted for him - but many folks otherwise drawn to the Tea Party movement did not. He had minimal crossover appeal - he never came across as a guy who could understand what middle America is going through.

He never stated a clear, principled reason why he should win, other than he wasn't Obama. And to beat the incumbent, you have to do just that, as Reagan did in 1980. In other words, he failed to win over millions of disaffected Obama voters - they simply did not vote for president.

Mitt's fault. A terrible candidate in a winnable, Jimmah Carter kind of election.

I wasn’t a huge romney fan. a little too moderate for me. BUT....I think he did a very good, very mature job of running for president. he was positive and knowledgable and inclusive. His VP choice was awesome. I don’t think we can blame this loss on romney.

we have to accept the fact that half of americans believe in voting themselves money...from the welfare rats to the unions. How can he fight that? not with a message of personal responsibility.

Ann Coulter is wrong, Bill O’Reilly is right. Mitt Romney lost this election with his “run out the clock” strategy.

He refused to engage on Benghazi. He refused to let Ryan discuss the budget, the same Ryan he was praised for having picked because that meant the budget would be on the table.

He would not confront conservatives about their anti-Hispanic rhetoric.

He shut down the discussion of ObamaCare, the issue that gave rise to the raging 2010 election Tea Party.

Ann Coulter’s explanation of “incumbency” is simply weak spin. I wonder if she’s smacked the “love of her life” for cheating on her with Obama?

Beyond all of this, Ann Coulter has left her God on the sidelines, as will all republicans who succumb to the notion that the political world is secular and their spiritual world view should not seriously inform their politics.

Above all else, to even say that we should set aside our spiritual world view is to affirm that Spirit is not real.

18
posted on 11/08/2012 5:30:47 AM PST
by xzins
(Retired Army Chaplain and Proud of It! True supporters of our troops pray for their victory!)

“Censorship was rampant throughout Nazi Germany. Censorship ensured that Germans could only see what the Nazi hierarchy wanted people to see, hear what they wanted them to hear and read only what the Nazis deemed acceptable. The Nazi police dealt with anyone who went outside of these boundaries. Censorship dominated the lives of the ordinary citizen in Nazi Germany.”http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/censorship_in_nazi_germany.htm Change Nazi/Germany to Progressive Liberal America.

Most of the tens of millions of citizens of this nation get their “News” and from the Entertainment Industry in one form or another; and that media are controlled by the Progressive Liberals. If your only input is from the MEDIA controlled by the Progressive Liberals, that is what determines your intellectual criteria. Conservative Blogs and Fox are the exceptions and only inform a few million citizens. Romney did very well given the wholesale Media attacks, even got a few newspapers to change endorsements from 2008.

19
posted on 11/08/2012 5:37:00 AM PST
by BilLies
(The Progressive Liberal American Press will be the death of freedom in this country.)

All of Romney’s negatives, real or perceived, still don’t add up to making Obama a rational choice given his record. If you are looking for somebody who can’t be smeared or demonized by other side then good luck, even Christ had to put up with that.

The vote that took place is an indictment of the American people, not Mitt.

The Romney I saw in the debates, especially the first one, could have been a great president. What killed his chances were the negative campaigning that portrayed him as a monster, the complicit media that served as willing messengers for Obama's lies and distortions while covering up his disasters like Benghazi and a miserable Romney campaign. I live next to the battleground state of Iowa and our local TV and radio cover a large part of that market. I did not hear or see a single Romney ad until about two weeks before the election.

The GOP leadership should have had their convention far earlier to end the internal spats of the primaries and to vet the primary candidates better. I'm sorry but Michelle Bachman was a terrible candidate and Herman Cain's checkered past should have been know early on and used quietly removed him from the race. Their continued presence in the primaries along with Newt's vacillation and Gov. Perry's clumsy missteps kept the media circus going and fractured the party. Who ever were the idiots that agreed to the debates with the likes of Candy Cowley as moderator also need to be sacked. We saw how effective the debates were when Jim Lehrer, to his credit, stood back and let the candidates spar on the issues. The subsequent debates were fiascoes because the liberal moderators ran the debates to favor Obama or Biden.

I believe a conservative candidate still has a chance to be POTUS as even the fools who reelected Obama will eventually become disillusioned as the country crumbles under Obama and their promises of free stuff don't materialize.

I think there is a lot of meat in this article, and much that conservatives could learn from. But, I actually go a bit farther than Ann. What is not being recognized by many in the conservative world is that demographics are changing in America. I don’t mean just that Hispanics are moving here and so on, but that the ideological leaning of the nation is shifting as it does everywhere all the time. This must be considered if the GOP, or any conservative party, would hope to win national elections.

Some 60 years ago or so segregation was an acceptable policy for many Americans, and politicians often fought to maintain it. However after just a decade or so things had changed for the mass of people in the nation and any politicians still pushing that ideology appeared absurd and evil to those people. Anyone publicly endorsing laws against interracial marriage in the 80s would never be able to get the votes of suburban middle America which are necessary to win a national office. America would not promote or accept that idea anymore, and any practical definition of conservative could no longer include racial segregation, regardless of how much it may have been a traditional value for many. That generation of voters simply could not accept any definition of conservative that included telling people what color people they could marry, and so conservatism eventually moved forward. This is necessary and essential in a changing demographic if one actually wants to win elections, rather than just losing and being able to proudly trumpet one’s ideological purity.

The same is true for the conservative movement today, and many in the movement just don’t want to admit it. Conservatism cannot be relevant if it can be caricatured as nothing but a bunch of people trying to pass laws forcing people to follow Victorian era morality constraints. And while Romney probably did a reasonable job in staying on the economy overall, that ugly image of the ‘morality police’ was used effectively by our opponents against us and will be for the future if we don’t find a way to change our image. We have to see the writing on the wall and learn to focus on issues which we can actually gain support and create change. It doesn’t matter how much we personally want a more moral society, we simply aren’t going to get laws forcing others to live our way. And more to the point, we aren’t going to be elected at all if we constantly push that agenda, and that means not getting any of our ideas across, including saving this failing economy.

This is a difficult loss to swallow, I actually think Romney outperformed my expectations. He did quite well, he drew the distinctions between what he and Bambi would do very clearly.

Here were his problems: 1. The media. In the tank, never seen it worse, reporting non existent "gaffes" for Romney all the time, not reporting on things that would have sunk their preferred candidate. It was sick.2. The electorate is no longer the electorate of 1980, it's close to 50% that have no comprehension of the negatives of big government, close to 50% who are either takers or those effete white (supposedly intelligent) liberals who are so stupid they are willing to sell themselves and their children in to slavery. These people were not offended by the insanity of the Bambi ads, programs, and positions, they actually like them (free birth control!). In 1980 they would have been laughed off the stage like the McGovernites, today they win elections.3. The circular firing squad where all of us took out our decent candidates.4. Newt started the negative ads about Bain, Bambi captitalized on them, continued them, and ran them over and over in the swing states, and they stuck for the duration(see # 2 above).5. Not enough purist conservatives and evangelicals understood the stakes here. Staying home (believing or being cowed by the ads of # 4 above) was suicide, but they were too inwardly focused to understand that simple fact. Now they will mutter, sputter and bitch about the decline of our country that is inevitable, the destruction that will take away everything they claimed they loved. Bambi, and his minions (the face of genuine evil) won, and they are now free to continue to destroy everything we love. We will be forced to pay for abortions, forced to pay for free loaders, forced to destroy our military, pay higher taxes, unionize our businesses, and watch the acceleration of moral decay. Congratulations to the purists, they won, and don't even know what they lost.

I did not like Mitt in the primaries, to say I thought little of him is way too nice, I simply thought he would be a horrible candidate. I hoped for Palin and Newt, or Perry, or anyone more conservative than Mitt. I honestly think each one of them would have been blown off the stage by the issues mentioned above, it would not have been even close. In the end, I reluctantly am dragged in to believing that Romney was a decent candidate, maybe the best one available, and that we have found the enemy and it is us.

Well heck yeah, at least on this board. Go ask any of the freepers on the "moral absolutes" pinglist.

They want candidates who will say loudly and often, "Raped by your stepfather?? God wants that child to be born!!"

They want a President who will outlaw all abortions by EO on the first day of office.

And they don't care if they never win another election for the rest of their lives - no matter how many millions of the unborn die in the interim - as long as their precious self-righteousness stays intact.

I have a hunch that when they meet their Maker, He may not congratulate them on their hardheadedness.

The problem was not with conservatives - just about everyone here came around to realizing what four more years of Obama meant.

The problem was largely with the fact that Obama lost eight million voters and Romney failed to pick up any signficant number of them. He actually came in with a lower total of voters than McCain in 2008 - and McCain was functioning in an epic bad year for Republicans whereas Romney had a Carteresque opponent - and thought just running against Obama would suffice. But he offered little to the voters leaving Obama, so they simply did not vote.

The recipe for success was demonstrated in 2010. Grassroots, vigorous conservatism that drew in the dissastified Obama swing voters by offering a robust alternative to both progressives and wampy RINO moderation. And the response of the GOP-E? Treat the Tea Party as unwanted relations. And that led directly to their loss. The Tea Party in the end even tried to help push that tried-and-failed jalopy over the finish line - but it was too late.

The trick is not to be more like Democrats. The GOP loses when it tries that. The trick is to state clear conservative values - and MEAN it. Romney never meant a word of it, so his words had no attractive value to the crossover voters of 2010.

Are you sure you’re comfy at FR? What’s your screen name at trublueliberty.com? Your nasty little post reminds me of the sort of obsessive filth posted there on the ‘TOS’ threads which obsess on Freerepublic and hate for Jim Robinson. [BTW, your covers are slipping.]

The Bain campaign stuck like glue and I am convinced cost Romney votes from middle class and working class taxpayers (the McCain voters from '08).

Because as decent as Romney may be, everything about his career smells "finance guy....Wall Street deal broker".

Take a Mitt Romney and subtract the personal integrity, and you've got the exact type that brought us all the bubbles, Too Big To Fail and the bailouts.

You can be rich and still win Main Street's approval if you are a hands on businessman who delivers products and services. Not a contract wrangler who makes his millions by transaction fees on paper moving around.

And yes, it was Newt who first attacked Romney on the Bain issue, and I'll always think the less of him for that. It was way, way beneath him.

My mther bore me and raised me despite the reality that she was raped making her pregnant with me. Her virtue is a huge contrast to your progressivist rhetoric. You are exposing yourself as ‘the enemy’, so keep posting your alinskyesque crap, n00b. And wehat’s that TBL screen name?

My mther bore me and raised me despite the reality that she was raped making her pregnant with me. Her virtue is a huge contrast to your progressivist rhetoric. You are exposing yourself as ‘the enemy’, so keep posting your alinskyesque crap, n00b. And what’s that TBL screen name? ... I’ll look you up next time I’m over there.

My mother bore me and raised me despite the reality that she was raped making her pregnant with me. Her virtue is a huge contrast to your progressivist rhetoric. You are exposing yourself as ‘the enemy’, so keep posting your alinskyesque crap, n00b. And what’s that TBL screen name? ... I’ll look you up next time I’m over there.

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